RHEL7: Changes between versions.

Presentation

The RHEL 7 release brought many changes from RHEL 6, some of them breaking backward compatibility (Systemd, etc). Unfortunately, such changes happened between versions of RHEL 7 too.
Here you will find a non-exhaustive list of such changes.

NFS

The RHEL 7.1 release completely changed the way the various NFS services worked.

The nfs-secure-server service doesn’t work the same way anymore, the nfs-idmap service has a new brother, nfs-idmapd, and the Kerberos NFS client gets a new nfs-client.target.

Most of this is not really explained in the official Red Hat documentation!

A new option called RemoveIPC was introduced in RHEL 7.2 through Systemd v219. When set to yes, this option forces a cleanup of all allocated inter-process communication (IPC) resources linked to a user leaving his last session. If a daemon is running as a user with a uid number >=1000, it may crash.

This option should always be set to no by default but, due to the logic of package upgrade, it is highly advisable to set RemoveIPC=no in the /etc/systemd/logind.conf file followed by # systemctl restart systemd-logind (source).

Certificate Verification in Python

The Python standard library includes multiple modules that provide HTTP client functionality, including httplib, urllib, urllib2, and xmlrpclib. While these modules support HTTPS connections, they traditionally performed no verification of certificates presented by HTTPS servers, and offered no way to easily enable such verification (source).

In RHEL 7.0 and RHEL 7.1, there was no certificate verification.

In RHEL 7.2, a new file was created called /etc/python/cert-verification.cfg with verify=disable as main content.

In RHEL 7.3, the same file now displays verify=platform_default: this means that certificate verification depends on hard-coded value in the ssl module. According to the ssl module used, certificate verification will happen or not. However, it is perfectly possible to assign enable or disable to the verify directive to define the wanted behavior.